What are you doing on Saturday 3rd November and Sunday 4th? If you don’t know, but are a fan of all things open data, then head on down to Open Data Camp at the University of Aberdeen where a bunch of very enthusiastic and informed people, (including us!) will be there to discuss, debate, listen to and enjoy all manner of open data.

If you’ve never been to an Open Data Camp, you’re in exactly the same position as I was last October — to allay any worries that it may not be worth a weekend of your time please read my post on what you can expect there because (spoiler alert) it was ace.

We’ve sponsored Open Data Camp since it started and we’re happy to be sponsoring again. See you there!

We’re happy to say Swirrl is once again sponsoring Open Data Camp as it heads towards Bristol for its next leg.

It’s our favourite conference on data: attracting a crowd of people who are enthusiastic and knowledgeable about what they do, exchanging ideas and news in a relaxed atmosphere.

We’re grateful to the team of volunteer organisers (see the Eventbrite page for a list – thanks all!) for all their efforts to put on these events, and we’re glad to help by putting in some money towards the costs.

Our CEO, Bill Roberts, will be there and keen to talk about publishing, connecting and analysing open data, making better use of statistical data in the public sector, connecting up satellite data to the web, and more.

Looking forward to seeing you in Bristol!

(PS: if you like Open Data Camp, you’ll probably also like the Data-Driven Decisions event that Swirrl is running in Manchester on 26 May 2016. Tickets now available! Tickets are free, but we’re asking for donations to Manchester Coder Dojo, helping inspire and educate our next generation of technologists.)

Open Data Camp v2.0 is coming to Manchester in October and we’re happy to say we’ll be sponsoring it once more! Just like the first Open Data Camp, it’s devoted to all things Open Data over two days and is a great style of event; with an unconference set up and lots of enthusiastic people who really know their stuff on a range of topics.

We’re delighted to support ODCamp because if the Winchester event in February was anything to go by it will be great fun and very interesting, but also because there will be lots of current or potential users of our PublishMyData open data publishing platform there.

It’s a great opportunity for us to hear about what kind of problems people are trying to solve with data; what kind of datasets they are trying to connect together and what approaches they are taking to analysing the data to help them with their decision making.

We’ll have a chance to show off some of the ways we can already help with that, and go home with a bucketload of ideas for how to make PublishMyData better still.

And it’s being held 10 minutes walk from our office – so if anyone needs tips on where to find good beer or curry, let us know!

We’re happy to be sponsoring the first Open Data Camp UK and we’re looking forward to hearing, and seeing, what people are doing with Open Data. To us, as data publishers, the best thing about opening up data is the freedom it gives you to create something useful.

But if you link your open data the possibilities really open up. So, in that spirit, this post is about what publishing Linked Open Data really means and some of the practical advantages it has.

“a method of publishing structured data [on the web] so that it can be interlinked and become more useful.”

With Linked Data, each data point (i.e thing or fact) has its very own URL on the Web. This is unique and because it’s readily available on the internet, people can look it up easily. And Linked Open Data can also contain links to other facts, so you can discover more, related data.

The linked data “cloud”

But Linked Data also rocks if you want to make something with the data. This is because when you look up the linked data page, all the metadata about it is embedded in: so there are no ambiguous column names to slow you down.

And if data is published as linked, as well as being published on a web site, it means that it comes with APIs, including a SPARQL endpoint – so developers can query the data in a variety of formats and use the data in their own programs.

But it’s not just for the techies – if you’re not technical, linking up your open data has other advantages.

It makes it easier to work with open data across organisations and departments because it’s not locked into silos: anyone can access it, making it truly open.

Linking open data with other data sources and having specific names for things saves time and effort when problem solving. Take a look at Steve Peters’ post on Joining The Dots across departments.

It’s low cost and sustainable – you convert the data once and reuse it – again and again. As part of our PublishMyData service, you can update your data yourself.

By linking your open data, it makes it easier to create apps and visualisations which are a friendly, quick way in to the data.